


Together as Fools

by doomcanary



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Brotherhood, F/M, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-27
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 04:04:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1373275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomcanary/pseuds/doomcanary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Three react to the women of their worlds. Likely to become part of a longer series of connected fics.</p><p>Title from a quote by Martin Luther King Jr: “We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tourney

The grass is lush and green here in the countryside; the royal hunting lodge at Versailles is a modest enough building for a King, but its setting is verdant in the full leaf of summer. Porthos stands as if on a field of snow, every branch in his heart naked as he watches his lovely widow walk away.

“So. Will you marry the lovely widow-er, Alice?”

Porthos waits a moment for the words to come; when they do they're exactly what he'd expect himself to say.

“Who'd look after you if I did that, eh?”

Aramis hesitates, before he claps Porthos on the shoulder as he always has. Porthos knows he's easy to read for some, and Aramis has a keen eye for such things at the best of times. To his fellow musketeer he might as well be carrying his bleeding heart in his hands. That tiny pause means everything to him. It tells him Aramis understands. He may not have Alice, but he has his brothers.

Porthos is not one to think over heavily; in the next days he _feels_ , more than anything. Heavy, as if he's swallowed a gallon of musket shot; constricted, as if there are bonds around his chest. He doesn't reason or ask his feelings why; he simply accepts them, and waits for them to end.

The only question that echoes in his mind, over and over, is this: 

What will happen when I leave the Musketeers?

Nobody can be a soldier forever. The lucky get too old to be any use. 

Perhaps he'll be luckier still. A dagger he never saw coming, or a musket ball he cannot dodge. 

Perhaps when he leaves his brothers, he'll be dead.

 

 


	2. Bourbon-les-Eaux

The nuns hurry back and forth with bottles and murmured prayers. Athos's pistol barks and a cry rings out. Aramis's eyes dart across the field of view he has through the shattered window; there is nothing. He takes aim anyway, and waits.

Aramis...

Aramis loves women. He has always loved women. Ever since Isabelle, ever since that golden window into a future was taken from him... he has tumbled from bed to bed because he knew that only she could ever have been the one. Though he has always tried to be kind to them they didn't matter, those endless, faceless girls, because they  _were_ _not her_ . They were... satiation. Warmth in the cold nights. A blessed relief from the loneliness of lost love.

He was lonely without Isabelle. Nobody else.

 

Movement. The match of his musket swings down and another of Gallagher's men tumbles to the ground. There are more of them in the trees, scuttling like cockroaches just out of range of his weapons. He reloads, the sequence so instinctive he hardly needs to watch his hands.

 

Isabelle, _Isabelle._ How could she say those things? Did she really believe him so shallow, so unaware? Could she truly think that Aramis would not have loved, have protected, have died for his own child? In his mind's eye he sees the faces of Athos and Porthos, and their eyes are disappointed. Sad. The plaster is cold where he presses against it, resting his head. And then a shot sounds, and he is a musketeer again.

 

And then the cockroaches left the trees for the tunnels, and he was running, running, and Isabelle was dead. She lay bloody and leaden in his trembling arms, another piece of his past laid bare before God. Only Isabelle's words were left behind. Isabelle, who might have taken those words back, softened them, explained something he had misunderstood - Isabelle was dead. Those words carved themselves onto his heart as if onto marble.  _You were never meant for marriage, Aramis_ .

No; no. It was Sister Helene who lay dead, given up at last to her Lord. Isabelle... perhaps Isabelle had already died, perhaps she had died with their child when it was lost. Perhaps the death of Aramis's child had been God's judgement on his youthful sin.

But Isabelle had _chosen_ the convent. Begged her own father not to tell him where she fled. Isabelle... had she ever been real? What had he loved, if not the woman she was?

His mind roils. What price his life now, what sins a thousand times remade has he entered into with so many willing girls? How many bastard children in Paris wear his eyes? Visions dance in his head of the painted murals in the churches of his youth; incubi with gross and swollen pricks throw themselves on godly women, staining innocent souls as they slake their lust. He must not, _cannot_ be such a creature as that.

Then whence all that passion, that heat, the drive ever to bury himself in womens' flesh? If it was not Isabelle that drove him, _what had he loved_? The faces of his brothers come to mind again; always so close to him, never quite in reach. Porthos, warm confidante and indulgent father confessor. Athos his eternal standard, a wry and honest judge. And d'Artagnan, who... who is always there; slender and laughing, the one he turns his back on as he leads some flush-faced girl to bed. He turned away from women and his brothers alike; always Aramis, always alone.

Did he even love at all?

What _was_ he?

 

It is then that Anne comes to him, gentle and forgiving. She sees good in his eye for risk and danger, value in his base and violent hands. A colder eye might see a young Queen, as lonely in her marriage bed as in the echoing corridors of state, reaching out for comfort wherever it might be found. But Aramis sees something else: a saint. Anne is redeeming him, showing him his place. At Anne's side he is her protector. Her Musketeer.

When he kisses her it is as if he has been in a desert; her mouth is cool water flooding into him. His visions melt and slide before that sensual flood; the cackling incubi fade from view, the faces of his brothers turn away. He sinks into a lithe, soft body once again, and as he sheaths himself Aramis is whole.

Aramis loves women.

Aramis loves Anne.


	3. Tabula Rasa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set after the end of Season One.

“Do you think he's all right?”

“He'll be fine, d'Art.”

“Best leave him to it, if you ask me.”

D'Artagnan is learning to trust Porthos's advice. He tries not to think too hard about just what Porthos's life before the regiment was like; how it was he came to know so much about pain.

 

A little away from them Athos is standing, leaning against the wall in the morning sun. One foot against the doorframe with his knee crooked, he sips from a tankard, his scabbard a slim black pen-stroke to his right. Without his hat, the sun touches his face like a blessing; when he closes his eyes it shines through his eyelids, rendering even the darkness warm.

He will come to it in time, to sorting through the chaos of memories and storing away the whitening scars, the old pain. He will look once more into her forget-me-not eyes, see again the momentary chase of emotions, the icy close of malice around her soul.

He will never know her. Never fathom the depths of that beautiful mind, never understand what had sown the seed that she so carefully nurtured into a tree. She cannot trust; nothing can be done to breach the fortress she has built around her heart.

And she is gone.

 

Some day, Athos will be a Musketeer again; he will take up his sword against the enemies of the King. He'll feel joy to have his brothers around him – even if they think he can't see them now, standing in a clutch by the inn door, clucking over him no doubt like hens. It makes him smile, wide and indulgent, as he takes a drink again.

Some day Athos the Musketeer will go back to his life, his brothers, his world. But for now, Olivier de la Fere will simply live.


End file.
